Saturday, April 18, 2009

WORKING ON THE RAILROADS

WORKING ON THE RAILROADS

A much ballyhooed element in the Obama stimulus package is the $8 billion dedicated to inter-city rail projects. That’s an impressive sum compared to the paltry investments of the past, and it’s to be complemented by an additional one billion dollars in each of the next five years. It’s an example, say some, of the sort of transformative change that the administration is seeking to bring to this country. Thirteen billion dollars is a big enough pie, reports The Wall Street Journal on April 16, to spark a fierce competition among states from coast to coast to secure a bigger slice for themselves.

Meanwhile, across the Pacific, China has committed to build its own high-speed rail system by 2020. The Shanghai - Beijing link, the longest such line in the world, is almost complete and will cut the trip to five from eleven hours. Even relatively small provincial cities – eleven in Hebei Province alone -- will also be networked together, unleashing a vast potential for development. The cost? A cool five trillion renminbi, or almost $700 billion at current exchange rates, by 2020, most of it planned for the next few years.

Even if construction costs weren’t substantially lower in China, the vast discrepancy in ambition is glaring. My point isn’t that we ought to try to match the Chinese in the scope of our commitment to inter-city rail – though I would love to see that. The payoff of a major commitment to rail transportation is alluring. Lower green-house gas emissions. Less congestion on the highways. An end to a lot of short-haul air travel. Reduced demand for imported oil and gasoline. In short, a big step forward in the greening of America’s transportation system, which is a far greater polluter than our much maligned manufacturing sector.

Instead, what is most striking are the economic benefits that China is already seeing from its commitment to fundamental rather than incremental change in rail transportation. All across China factories are reportedly gearing up to produce steel track, locomotives, rail cars, switches, electronic equipment, and more to satisfy the half-trillion dollar market. The Chinese pie is big enough that investors are eager to produce all that’s needed to supply the burgeoning rail system.

Our incrementally bigger but still woefully inadequate investment, by contrast, is so limited that we will in all likelihood end up importing a good portion of what we eventually do install. That would deliver little of the vision the President laid out earlier this week at Georgetown University of a “future where sustained economic growth creates good jobs and rising incomes.”

In the 19th century, a few thousand Chinese workers were brought to America, to our shame sometimes by duress, to build the transcontinental railroad, using foreign capital and mostly American-made equipment. In the 21st century, more than 100,000 Chinese workers are building their own first-class rail system with their own capital and Chinese-made equipment. We should learn a lesson or two about the multiplier effects of high ambition and get to work on our railroads in earnest.